Legend · Traditional; Biafran war 1967-1970 · Mixed
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A goddess who found stolen things, a lion warned off with a handful of sand, a hunter who never came back, and a cave whose spirit hates the flash of a camera. The hill caves of Mmaku and Achi, and the war they helped people survive.
About sixty kilometres south of Enugu, a range of hills runs north to south across Igboland. It is known as the Nsukka-Okigwe cuesta. The historian Adiele Afigbo once suggested that the ancestors of the Igbo travelled along these hills from where the Benue meets the Niger before spreading out to the rest of Igboland, though, as later writers point out, he had no digging to prove it. Whatever the truth of that, the hills are full of caves, and two of the towns that sit on them, Mmaku and Achi, have a good number.
In 2018 two researchers from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Chidinma Oguamanam and Emeka Okonkwo, went to look at those caves. They did not only measure them. They sat with thirty-four people from the two towns, among them six chief priests, three women leaders, youth leaders, elders, farmers and craftsmen, and asked what the caves meant to them. Ten of the people they spoke to were women.
The first story they were told belongs to Inyikwe cave, in Enugwu Affam in Mmaku. Long ago, people said, a goddess named Nnechukwu lived there. Her work was simple and very useful. If something of yours was stolen, you went to her, and she helped you find it.
That turned out to be her undoing. There are two versions of what happened next. In the first, the people of Mmaku came to her so often, troubling her day and night, that in the end she grew tired of them and left. In the second, it was strangers who wore her out, or rather the jealousy of her own hosts. People from other villages began to come to Nnechukwu about their stolen things, and the Mmaku people were annoyed. Those outsiders, they felt, should have come through Mmaku first. Nnechukwu saw how selfish they were being, and she packed up and went to live at Ama-Owelli instead.
Either way, the lesson is not hard to find. A gift that is used too greedily, or guarded too jealously, can walk away.
Inyikwe still has its spring. Water gushes out of a rock beside the cave, and people drink from it. But there was a rule about that water too. A lion, the elders said, once lived there. So in the morning, before anyone stepped into the water, they would throw a handful of sand into it from a distance. The sand was a polite knock on the door. It told the lion that people were coming, and the lion would move out of the way.
Then comes the warning story. A hunter, they said, ignored the custom and went in with his dog without throwing any sand. The two of them wandered into the cave and were never seen again. To this day, the elders told the researchers, nobody knows where they went.
The cave itself is low. Its two openings are barely more than a metre high.
The biggest cave in Mmaku is Ogba Agu Ukwu, in Agu-Ukwu Ezioha village, almost three metres high and nearly five wide. Inside, the researchers found signs that people had once lived there: cooking utensils, tripod stands and big stones that seem to have served as seats. About ten metres away, a smaller cave lets out a spring, which would have made the place easy to live in, for people and animals alike.
In Achi the mood changes. The biggest cave there, Isiogba in Mkpam, links up with two others, Achiyi and Ohaudum. Nobody could tell the researchers how it began, only the rules that had come down from their forefathers. People believe an animal called Obo lives inside and is the spirit of the cave, along with pythons and bats. The cave is the home of a powerful and dangerous deity, and no visitor may enter until rituals have been done. On the day the researchers came, there was no chief priest available to do them, so they stayed outside.
At Achiyi, the cave joined to Isiogba, they were not allowed to take photographs at all. The deity there, their guides said, cannot stand the reflection of light. They had to draw it by hand.
Not all the stories are about gods. Some are about the people who hid.
Many of the caves, the elders said, had no tale of how they began. Hunters had simply come upon them while out in the bush. But the caves and rock shelters had been important since ancient times, and they mattered most of all during the Biafran war. People from the two towns went into them and made them homes. Because of that, the researchers were told, few lives were lost.
There are rock shelters too, shallow hollows under overhanging rock. One, Umude Nworji in Eziama village in Mmaku, is said to be the home of a big python that does no harm to the people of Mmaku. Another, Opia Echeta in Ezioha village, has its own waterfall, and is ringed by a pool of water that kept the team from measuring it.
The researchers wrote their paper to argue that these places could bring visitors, jobs and money to two hill towns. One man in Achi, whom they call Mr Raymond, agreed. Isiogba, he said, would make a fine place for visitors. But first, he added, the people of Achi would have to come together and ask the oracle what must be done before the cave could be opened to strangers.
It was a sensible answer. In Mmaku, after all, they already know what happens when a spirit feels it is being used without respect. It leaves.
